


Boys Gone Wild

by Siria



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - College, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-31
Updated: 2008-12-31
Packaged: 2017-10-03 20:39:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which there is Spring Break.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Boys Gone Wild

**Author's Note:**

> For Amber at Christmas.

See, Rodney had thought that now that he was sort-of-not-quite-okay-actually-yes dating John Sheppard—leading member of the university's most exclusive fraternity, scion of a family with more wealth than several sovereign nations, the guy with enough _fuck you_ slouch in his stance to stop himself from being just another one of the preppy, floppy-haired invertebrates who littered the campus—that he'd get to see that social aspect of college that people tended to witter on about. The quote-unquote college experience: the part that was less about books and theorems and standing on the shoulders of giants and more about, you know, keggers and frat parties and public nudity and topless chicks a-go-go.

("Topless chicks a-_go-go_?" John said, _har-har-har_-ing so hard that his breath came in great, gasping snorts.

"Shut up," Rodney said, and hit him over the head with a slightly damp pillow. "It's a _term_.")

Three months with John hadn't quite lived up to what Rodney had thought it would be—or rather, being with John hadn't quite lived down to Shep's (largely unwarranted, it turned out) reputation, despite their now habitual make-out sessions in the library stacks—but next week was Spring Break, and _everyone _ knew what Spring Break was like. There were bound to be drugs and alcohol and sex in improbable positions and a veritable panoply of venereal diseases: really, the gamut of things that made it fun to be human while at the same time pointing out the vaguely improbable absurdity of the species having survived for as long as it had.

Rodney'd spent all his previous spring breaks holed up in the library, reading, or taking advantage of the mostly-empty labs to run competing experiments against that weird foreign student from Prague, what's-his-name, the guy with the outlandish hair and worse theories about structures in sub-space. They had been productive, yes, but also—well, lonely probably wasn't the correct term.

This year, however, this year was going to be different. John had vaguely mentioned something about being down beside the water, so Rodney had visions of Miami's acid-bright colours and _Girls Gone Wild_ shoots and licking tequila off John's flat belly.

But when they were in the car and on their way, one of the last to pull off the campus behind Aiden's battered VW bug (essential supplies like fourteen pairs of clean boxers apiece, a bumper pack of Twinkies, three bottles of Mountain Dew and an assortment of condoms and lube stuffed into the duffle bag thrown onto the back seat), John told Rodney that they were not going to Florida.

They were not going to southern Texas, with Ronon and his zoology buddies, or to the Caribbean with Teyla and Jennifer and their sorority sisters—skilled hands at mixing building for Habitat for Humanity with the consumption of some seriously strong cocktails.

They were not even going to the south-east.

They were going to _Minnesota_.

Rodney felt all hopes of passing out with his head in the lap of a cute blonde co-ed fade away when John put on his sunglasses and shrugged and said that he was reliably informed that St Paul-Minneapolis was the party capital of the Midwest.

"It's Spring Break," Rodney said slowly, "And I am willingly leaving my research with you to go to St Paul, _Minnesota_."

John shifted in his seat, and kept his gaze fixed more firmly on the road in front of him. "Well...." he said slowly. "No."

For just a moment, Rodney nourished the faint hope that he'd just been subjected to a bout of Sheppardian so-called humour—that they really were going to Fort Lauderdale, or New Orleans, or anywhere else where the temperature and the alcohol supply militated against much by way of clothing—that John would switch lanes and take them right, not left, out of town. For just a moment, though, because John cleared his throat and shifted gears with perhaps more emphasis than a car this age could stand. "We're actually headed a little bit outside of St Paul. Well, a _bit_. Couple hundred miles. Give or take."

Rodney was, perhaps, a little high-pitched when he made what he thought was a cogent and relevant point. "You're bringing me into the _wilderness_? There are _bears_ in the wilderness!"

John said, "There aren't any bears! Well. No _big_ ones."

It turned out that John had been roped into house-sitting—well, cabin-sitting, actually—for a friend of his dad's, a Colonel O'Neill. It was the kind of thing that Rodney's parents would make him do, too, but where Rodney would resent it, and loudly, John honestly didn't seem to mind.

"It's a nice place, Rodney. Fridge is always stocked with beer and Jack won't mind us having a couple—plus, the fish in the pond is there for the catching."

"Fish."

"It'll be cool. Sit on the dock, knock back a couple of beers, catch some trout, cook it over the fire in the evenings..."

Rodney stared at him. "Cook a festering breeding ground of salmonella over an _open fire_? Oh my god, please tell me this place has electricity."

"Sure it does!" John said, too brightly, before mumbling something that sounded suspiciously like, "... _now_."

"_John_."

"There's just, uh. No cable or cell phone reception or internet."

Rodney sighed dramatically and flopped back against the car door. "You know," he said, "this was supposed to be my one great Spring Break. The week I could never tell my parents about, my opportunity to bask in reflected cool. I had a list of debauchery to experience at least once—there were _supposed _ to be _nipples_."

John waggled his eyebrows at him over the tops of his sunglasses. "I can—"

Rodney sighed again, and cut him off with a decisive hand gesture. "Oh my god, shut _up_, you dork. Why did I ever think you were _cool_?"

"Because," John drawled, "I have really _great_ nipples."

*****

Around about their seventh hour on the road, Rodney thought it would be funny to whine, in his best approximation of John's nasal drawl, "Are we _there_ yet?"

Around about the tenth hour, with Rodney mulish and the car heater not working, John was checking the satnav every five minutes and muttering, "Why _aren't_ we there yet?"

Ten hours and thirty five minutes in, John realised that the Colonel's cabin was on a dirt road so small that the Garmin didn't pick it up.

Rodney was not impressed.

Ten hours and thirty seven minutes in, he did a U-turn on the narrow little road abruptly enough that they almost hit a passing John Deere tractor.

If Rodney hadn't been so happy to have survived, he might have turned murderous himself.

Twelve hours, nineteen minutes and eleven seconds—give or take a few—after they'd left their dorm, John turned the car off outside of a cabin which was as prime a candidate for damp and dry rot as Rodney had ever seen.

"Twelve hours, nineteen minutes and eleven seconds," he told John as they dropped their duffle bags on the floor of the living room-cum-kitchen and staggered into the bedroom, pulling off shoes and coats as they went. "No offence, but I hate your stupid face and your godawful taste in music and I never want to see you again."

"Same here, buddy," John said, jaw cracking from the strength of his yawn; and then the two of them were toppling onto the neatly made bed, burrowing underneath the quilted comforter, legs tangling companionably together, Rodney's arm slung heavily around John's waist.

*****

Things looked different in the next morning's light. Not, Rodney hastened to tell John over his enormous mug of coffee, _better_—merely different.

"It's a cabin, Rodney," John said, around a mouthful of bread slathered thickly with butter and honey, "The nearest town is like twenty miles away—it's not like we're in the absolute middle of nowhere."

"No, just its approximate location," Rodney grumbled, and resolutely did not redden when John pressed a honey-sticky, exasperated kiss to his cheek.

John went to take a shower—the boiler heating up slowly with several ominous sounding rattles and clanks—in a cubicle that Rodney decided seemed tailor-made for the dissemination of SARS, not cleanliness. While John warbled his way through a medley of Johnny Cash's greatest hits—substituting _doo dooby doo_ at those points where his memory for lyrics wasn't quick enough for his up-tempo enthusiasm—Rodney retired to the aged-looking plaid couch with one of the two books he'd brought with him. He hadn't thought he'd get time to do any research on this trip, what with the anticipated amounts of bendy-pretzel sex, so all he'd brought with him were two novels in paperback—not his usual reading fare, by any means, but Rodney had had hopes for a vacation of the mind as well as the body. About two chapters in, he realised exactly _why_ it was that he preferred not to spend his days vacant-minded and slack-jawed, reading about the overwrought antics of fictional morons.

"John!" he yelled over the sound of the trickling water. "I'm _booooored_."

The water shut off, and Rodney heard the shower curtain draw back, the sound of wet bare feet on the wooden floor. "Great," John called back. "That means you can come fishing with me."

"Now hold on," Rodney said, eyes widening, suddenly seeing the problems inherent with being too precipitate. "It's not that I'm _bored_, per se, more occupationally challenged, but I'm sure I have a pad and pencil somewhere and I can just—"

"Nuh uh," John said, sauntering in and pulling a red t-shirt down over his still-damp chest. "No take-backs."

"You are actually five years old, aren't you?" Rodney asked, voice made imperious by the power of his sheer exasperation. "A toddler given extraordinary height and out-sized feet."

"Yup," John said, and flopped down onto the couch, landing said out-sized feet in Rodney's lap.

"I hate you," Rodney moaned.

"Hate you too, McKay," John said mildly.

*****

Fishing, it seemed, involved stupid hats. Rodney had one, and John had one, and they sat in their stupid hats at the end of the stupid dock trying to catch stupid fish. Rodney sighed, and squinted out across the green-grey water at the trees that marched away up the hill at the other side of the lake. "Stupid," he sighed.

"Hey," John said, nudging him with his shoulder, "You're not stupid! It's just a run of bad luck—you'll catch something soon!"

John was trying to be encouraging—worse than that, he was trying to be _peppy_. Rodney turned a stare on him that had had a cowing effect on eminent scientists with a string of letters after their names, but all John did was smile.

"I don't know if you have realised this," Rodney said, with what he thought was infinite patience, "but I actually have remarkably little interest in proving the, the _virility of my manhood_ by catching an animal that's barely sentient in the first place—"

"Fish, Rodney, not an animal," John murmured, dangling his feet off the end of the dock and twitching his line so that his lure bobbed a couple of feet to the left.

"—not to mention the fact that I was hoping to do that in an entirely _different place._ Well, not the manhood part—oh, shut up," he said to John's leer, "I meant the whole red-blooded American—or Canadian, I suppose—red-blooded North American male on Spring Break thing. It's the experience you're supposed to have in college, the whole…" He waggled a hand vaguely—he wasn't sure what the experience was, entirely, only that Jeannie always seemed certain, during her phone calls to him, that Rodney should be having a College Experience, and it seemed to involve more alcohol than Rodney generally consumed during a night in the library. "And instead we're in _Minnesota_," he finished, a little more disconsolately than he intended, "the sugar beet capital of Middle America."

"It's not that bad, is it?" John said.

"What do you mean, it's _not that bad_, it's Minnesota on Spring Break, we might as well be in _Michigan_, for god's sake—" Mid-sentence, Rodney glanced over at John and saw how he was staring out at the lake, holding himself so carefully you'd swear each individual bone was bearing up against an extra atmosphere of pressure; his jaw was set firm. "Oh, oh, wait, this _means_ something to you?" he yelped. "This is _important_? Why didn't you _say_?"

"It's nothing, McKay, it's—"

"Do not lie to me!" Rodney said, dropping his fishing rod to the dock with the clatter so that he would gesticulate freely with both hands. "I can tell when you're lying about important things! Your drawl gets extra drawly, and your mouth does that, that twitchy thing."

"I'm not _twitching_, I..." John huffed out a breath and scrubbed at his hair with his free hand. "Spring Break always kind of... sucks, okay? It's too noisy and crowded and full of idiots and last year, Aiden puked into my Converse. It's—I think you'd hate it, and I _know_ I do, and I'd prefer to just—"

"The two of us?"

John shifted his weight from side to side, and couldn't quite look Rodney in the eye. "Maybe."

"You'd rather spend a week fishing in a small, smelly cabin with me than on a beach somewhere sub-tropical, with mostly-unclad people of both sexes, drinking lots of those drinks that come with little paper umbrellas and a cherry on a stick?"

"I suppose."

And that, Rodney thought, was John Sheppard in a nutshell—trust him to give you his all and look embarrassed when you noticed; trust him to speak imperfectly in a language Rodney was only just, himself, beginning to learn. "Well," Rodney said, aiming for diffidence and achieving only awkwardness, his attempt at a nonchalant shrug of his shoulders making him look more as if he had a bad crick in his neck, "here's not so bad. I guess I can forego maritime canoodlings for one year."

_Maritime canoodlings_? John mouthed. His eyebrows shot up, his spine relaxing as tension ebbed from it, leached away by the laughter that was starting to bubble up from the pit of his belly. "You wanted _maritime canoodlings_?"

"What? What? It's a perfectly legitimate—why are you grinning like that? John? _John_—"

Rodney had told John once, back at the beginning of them, that he was a quick study, and it hadn't been a lie—he'd learnt very swiftly that that particular curve of John Sheppard's mouth spelled nothing but trouble, and his instincts weren't leading him astray this time.

"Rodney," John drawled, eyes alight, "We're sitting by a _lake_—you can have all the maritime canoodling you _want_." And then he pounced, and pushed, and the two of them went tumbling into the cool water of a Minnesota lake in April—Rodney yelping as his mouth caught up with his startled nerves; John's _har har har_ echoing off the wide waters around them, the spreading stands of tall evergreen trees; bellies pressed together through damp cotton when John pulled Rodney close, kissed him until Rodney shivered—from the water, and the wild, and John.


End file.
